EG_Websites_36

Green Twinspot (Mandingoa nitidula), photographed at the Moka Wildlife Center on Bioko island in Equatorial Guinea. In January of 2016, Luke Powell, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, teamed up with Jared Wolfe, a wildlife ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, Jacob Cooper, a PhD student with the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at The University of Chicago, and Kristin Brzeski, a wildlife biologist and Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellow, for a week-long expedition Luba Crater Scientific Reserve — a densely forested protected portion of the southern end of Bioko Island that's home to a spectrum of primate species and at least 120 bird species, a couple dozen of which are endemics only found on Bioko. Because of the steep crater walls and isolated entrance through the remote lava field, much of the extinct volcanic crater and the reserve at large has remained relatively untouched by both developers and poachers. The rest of the island, which is currently home to Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, has seen extraordinary rates of development, natural habitat loss and a pillaging of forest animals to satisfy the country's appetite for bushmeat. And while the reserve offers some sanctuary and robust natural habitat, a recently completed road dissecting the park has given hunters roadside access to forested regions previously unreachable, and has led to widespread poaching and devastation of the wild animal population that once thrived on the southern end of Bioko Island before the road was built.